This week we've gotten in a couple of Seagate Momentus drives (Mercury) that are on the verge of total failure. Once we began the image process, the number of head mask errors started to increase so we stopped.

Usually when we get Momentus drives in for recovery, they have head crashes and media damage, although others can be recovered without surgery.

We've also received in a few Fujitsu 160 GB mobile drives with tons of unreadable errors, usually on one or two of the heads.

I'm curious . . . will a head swap likely fix the Seagate problem, or is it part of a bigger issue that eventually results in a crash?

Ditto with the Fujitsus. Anyone seen these lately?

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All of the bad or dead hard drives we replace for customers go downstairs into the hard drive vault where I keep them organized by series. Looking at the Momentus section, Mercury series drives outnumber everything else combined by about 3-4:1. Thats not even counting all of the ones that were still covered under Apple warranty and were shipped back to Apple.

I've tested these when looking for a firmware donor and all except for a few just go Head Mask FFFF over and over again when powered on. Many of the ones I've opened have visible platter damage. I tried a head swap or two on ones without visible platter damage and they would initialize once or twice, but quickly fail, I guess due to non-visible platter damage killing them.

The Mercuries are bad news. If I get one in that is having head-type issues it is quickly diagnosed as "most likely unrecoverable".

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Hi can you post the terminal errors from the momentus.

I have done some disks with a lot off errors.

http://forum.hddguru.com/seagate-st9808210as-t11230.html

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ZeBong
" что случилось в России - останется в России "
" Россия еще раз"